Porn in a Pocket

Stark naked, she pleads with folded hands. "Please mujhe jaane do (Please let me go)," she tells the man intent on raping her on the back seat of a car moving through rush-hour traffic in Delhi. He laughs maniacally and slaps her into submission while his friend on the front seat captures it all on a mobile phone.

Last year, nine million indians used mobile phones to download porn.A young Punjabi bride, the choora (white and red bangles) signalling her newly married status still in place on her wrists, is sexually violated in full view of a bunch of guffawing men. "Hai maa (Oh mother)!" she screams in obvious agony only to be admonished with Punjabi expletives by one of the bystanders for bringing her "pious" mother into the "gandagi (dirt)".

Amidst the sugarcane fields outside Haryana's Pataudi town, a young girl surrenders to her paramour's sexual demands. He revels in her anguished screams relenting only briefly to let her take a call from her mother. "I will be back in the afternoon," she tells the anxious parent as the boyfriend continues to record everything on his smartphone.

Millions of Indians are surreptitiously satisfying their secret voyeuristic selves with such clips and others even more sadistic. Nine million-plus Indians download and view proscribed adult content (pornography) on their mobile phones, according to a 2012 report on telecom portal Themobileindian.com quoting industry sources. Not to mention millions of others who are now consuming porn quite literally by the gigabyte-the vilest videos depicting real or contrived rape, incest, paedophilia and violent sex-now freely available on micro memory cards or pen drives at almost every mobile repair shop, cyber cafe, and even with pavement hawkers.

SLEAZE ON SALE NEXT DOOR

It is barely past 10 on a Friday morning and the bylanes of Gaffar Market in Delhi's Karol Bagh area are already teeming with buyers. Seated on a red plastic stool amid an eager huddle of migrant workers and college students, Bablu Singh, a young man attired in jeans and a flashy black-and-yellow T-shirt, shows them flitting images of all that he would let them have for the right price. With the practised air of a veteran salesman, he quickly strikes a deal with a factory worker and four friends-Rs 150 for three of the raunchiest Bhojpuri films and two dozen sex clips all neatly loaded onto the memory card on his Chinese smartphone. "You're getting a bargain. I know you will transfer it to your pals here for free," Singh tells the man, quickly moving on to to his next prospective customer. "You fellows are not going to believe what I have for you in here," he tells the college boys meaningfully drumming his fingers on his laptop. "These new clips probably have some girls you know." They are hooked as he deftly extracts the memory cards from the boys' phones to 'recharge'.

At South Mumbai's Manish Market, Salim is wary of well-attired strangers asking for blue film clips. But persistence invariably pays off. Yes, he can 'fix' your smartphone in more ways than replacing a cracked touchscreen. "Char GB ka do sau lagega (It will be Rs 200 for 4 GB)," he mumbles without looking up. Fifteen minutes later, you are walking out with 50 two-to-five-minute MMS videos-a mix of scandal clips, hidden camera footage from public washrooms and changing rooms, and some rather clumsily morphed videos of Bollywood celebrities 'in the act'. "Next time, just ask for dal-gosht (the name of a popular Parsi lamb and lentil curry that Mumbaikars employ as code for phone porn)," Salim advises.

Rohit Kumar, 22, is a school dropout who makes his living selling pirated DVDs on the pavement in Chandigarh's Sector 17 commercial centre. Desi and foreign rape videos, he says, are the most sought-after. "Everyone, students, rickshawwala bhaiyas and older gentlemen like you always ask for those first," the youngster smirks. But can he load it on a memory card or pen drive? "No problem, but delivery next day."

ADDICTION OF THE MORBID KIND

So do Indians share a morbid fascination for depictions of sexual violence? Mobile phones were used nearly 4.1 million times a month on average to search with the keyword 'rape' over the past year, according to Google AdWords. Search keywords included "Indian girls raped", "raping video", "raping stories", "raped in public", "little girl raped", "raping mom", "father raping daughter" and "raped to death". This again doesn't include people who go out and buy their fix of sleaze-on-the-go from mobile repair shops, the street corner DVDwala or the overly friendly cyber cafe owner.

A mobile repair store at Gaffar Market in Delhi.Yeshu, 31, a cook in one of Chandigarh's more affluent homes, says he has just recovered from what had become a consuming addiction for mobile pornography. For years the young tribesman from Assam spent nearly a fourth of his Rs 6,000 monthly wage on buying porn clips. His wife, a no-nonsense Christian from Jharkhand, put an end to his indulgence. "She just won't stand it," he says sheepishly. Two years on, the couple managed to buy a motorcycle with the money he saved on porn. And he still has the second-hand smartphone he bought at a bargain.

But Jayesh Patil, 19, canteen boy at a private bank in Mumbai's upmarket Nariman Point, does not see anything 'wrong' with his penchant for pocket porn. He splurges Rs 800 every month on pornographic clips bought from shops outside Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Patil attends night school in Parel and says watching porn has had no impact on his studies.

The obvious portability and the voyeuristic prospect of viewing smutty videos in public spaces seems to draw a wide cross-section of people to phone porn. Manmeet Kaur, 25, was shocked when she discovered dozens of 'rape porn' videos alongside "highly objectionable" footage with former girlfriends on her fiance's smartphone. She confronted her fiance with the evidence before dumping him. "He was two-timing me with his mobile phone," she says.

THE WORST IS YET TO COME

In February 2013 a year-long survey of 964 collegians by Rescue, a Mysore-based 'moral consciousness' group, concluded that 75 per cent of all male undergraduate or pre-university students regularly consumed porn. The study also reported that the boys were "six times more likely" to view the proscribed adult content on mobile phones.

Incredible as it may sound, the nine million Indians estimated to be using mobile devices to download porn, spend an average of Rs 5,500 every year on procuring content. The road ahead and its direction is no secret. The US-based Strategy Analytics estimates that smartphone penetration in India will touch 33 per cent of all mobile users by 2015. The Bangalore-based Convergence Catalyst, another mobile industry watchdog, predicts that India's smartphone market will double over 2013 crossing 44 million handsets.

In January 70-year-old Niyaz Raza of Govandi, Mumbai, was arrested after he allegedly raped a 13-year-old girl, his sixth victim, and circulated a 12-minute mobile phone video of the teenager performing oral sex on him. More recently, on April 15, 22-year-old garment factory worker Manoj Sah and 19-year-old Pradeep Kumar admitted in police custody that they had watched porn on Sah's mobile phone before raping a neighbour's five-year-old child in East Delhi.

CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER?

In April 2013, Kamlesh Vaswani, an Indore-based lawyer, petitioned the Supreme Court seeking legislation that would make the viewing of pornography a non-bailable, criminal offence. Vaswani says Indian society is in serious peril with young children having access to "more than 20 crore" porn videos and clippings of "graphic, violent, brutal, deviant and destructive" content than ever before.

Robert Jensen's July 2004 paper on VAWnet, a US online resource centre on violence against women, contends that all available studies broadly support the 1970s feminist critique of pornography-that it harms women and children. Psychologist and women's activist Kishwar Ahmed Shirali, 75, who works with women and child victims of violence in Kashmir, however, says the link between pornography and sexual offences has never been conclusively established. She says that most Indian men including those accused of rape "were exposed to a prevailing culture of patriarchy and misogyny for years before being exposed to pornography".

While the jury is still out, it's a chilling thought that your cook, driver, the neighbourhood postman, anyone among the line of autorickshawwalas on the street corner, the neighbour's teenage sons or even the nice young executive who lives next door and always offers to carry the groceries up to your flat, could have been watching porn on their mobile phones moments before they engaged with you. Or your five-year-old daughter.